I told my dad that I was going to take a course in cosmology
and he was like, what are you going to do with that?
That's not a useful thing to do.
What do you wish you had known about your career when you were my age?
I wish a lot of things.
It's a constant obsession.
My daughter said that it was amazing that somebody was going to be
interviewing me as their future self.
And then she pointed out that it may be that you turn out to be way cooler
than me.
It's fascinating how much there is out there that we don't know.
Every now and then, I stop and
sort of marvel at the immensity of the scales that we deal with.
Hello.
My name's Abby.
I'm studying PhB Science, and I would like to be an astrophysicist when I'm older.
My name is Naomi McClure-Griffiths, and I am a professor of astrophysics at ANU.
Today I'm going to be interviewing my future self, Naomi,
the astrophysicist. At a dinner party,
how do you explain what you do?
So I usually say I'm an astrophysicist and then people stop talking to me.
And so then I try to back up a little bit and I say that I study our own galaxy
and try to understand the structure of it and how it works.
What did you think your job was going to be like compared to what it actually is?
That's a good question.
I think I thought my job would be doing a lot of mathematics
and a lot of writing equations out, and instead
it's doing a lot of programming and a lot of things on the computer.
Do you do much maths in your job?
I do, but very sporadically.
So just just enough time in between that I have to go back and remember it all.
But then it comes back.
Yeah.
What did you want to do as a career when you were my age?
I became interested in doing astrophysics, probably around my second or third year.
So are we in the right ballpark there?
Yeah. Going into second year. Yeah.
I told my dad that I was going to take a course in cosmology
and he was like, what are you going to do with that?
That's not a useful thing to do.
I thought, I have no idea what I'm going to do with that, but I like it.
So I didn't actually have, like, a career plan.
I just thought I'd study and enjoy what I was learning.
What do you wish you had known about your career when you were my age?
I wish a lot of things.
I wish that I had known how non-stop it is.
So it's a it's a constant
obsession to be involved in research.
You're always chasing a question that you want an answer to,
and it's very hard to sort of stop and
put it aside and just carry on doing other things.
I don't think I would have changed anything,
but I think it would have sort of mentally prepared me for
what is sort of like getting on a treadmill.
When you get onto this career and you just keep going forever.
Have you faced any barriers in your career?
Yes, I'd say probably a few.
When I was
a student, I was the only woman in my physics major.
I used to refer to the ladies toilet as my office.
There was a sofa in there.
There was never anybody else there.
It was very pleasant.
It was a great place to get away from things,
but that also was fairly isolating to be the only woman at that time.
So that was a bit of a barrier.
I think.
So I'm a mother and being a mother and a researcher is not trivial.
But I haven't face any huge problems that were,
you know, oh my gosh, I don't know how to work my way through this.
It was just, you know, stumbling blocks along the way.
Yeah.
And do you think the
difference in genders, in physics careers is kind of changing?
It's changed enormously since, you know, I did my PhD.
a little over 20 years ago.
And since then, the number of women in PhD
programmes worldwide and, you know, in most countries has become almost 5050.
So that's that's a huge change.
It's got to filter its way up through the faculty.
There still aren't very many of us at the professorial level,
but certainly at the at the younger levels, it's much, much more balanced now.
And that's great to see.
What amazes you most about astrophysics.
The scale.
I think you know,
by definition, there's nothing bigger than the universe.
And the fact that we deal with things that are so big,
we talk about time scales that are in billions of years.
We talk about something that happened really quickly as being something
that happened on a few million year timescale.
That's a fast thing.
The fact that we're talking about distances.
I study the Milky Way and its close and I study things that are,
you know, 25,000, 75,000 light years away
and that's just a blink of an eye in the astronomical scale.
I think that's just every now and then I stop and
sort of marvel at the
immensity of the scales that we deal with.
I mean, you asked me a lot of questions
about sort of what I do and how how my career works.
Is there anything big in that that surprised you or
put you off wanting to be an astrophysicist?
Well, I like the sound of the diversity of the work you do.
So all the communication, like using computers, talking to students.
I guess I thought it would just be a lot of heavy calculations.
So it's nice to know that there's a lot of different things you can do.
And just looking at the sky sounds so amazing.
It's fascinating how how much there is out there that we don't know.
How you can just choose your own direction, what you want to learn.
My daughter said that it was amazing that somebody was going to be
interviewing me as their future self.
And then she pointed out
that it may be that you turn out to be way cooler than me. So.
So what happens if you become like, a million times more successful than me?
I'll make sure to tell everyone that it was you
who inspired me.